My children have the responsibility to clean the kitchen after meals and they do a decent enough job, but last night’s performance was less than stellar. When I came down to the kitchen this morning, I was met with a sauté pan containing dregs of a pan sauce unmoved from the stove, a measuring cup and whisk keeping company next to it, and three items, supposedly hand-washed, drying in a decidedly unclean state beside the sink. There appeared to have been a Big Splash Episode of dirty dishwater around the whole sink area in some way, too – I really don’t want to know. The proper, natural-consequences thing to do would be to make the boys re-do the work properly, but I confess I did not do it. I normally get up very early and have a fairly unvarying morning routine: dress, dog, unload dishwasher, coffee. I hate anything to interfere with this ritual, especially the coffee, and I need it to take place in clean surroundings. So, I cleaned.
And, like many kitchen cleaning sessions, one little job led to another. I washed up the dirty dishes. While I was rinsing out the sink, I cleaned up the Big Splash evidence all around it. My cloth just naturally traveled to the windowsill above the sink and I cleaned that, too, which made me notice how spotty the window itself had gotten so I got out the Windex and within a few minutes had cleaned the inside side of all my kitchen windows. When I put away the glass cleaner, I got out the degreaser, moved the little appliances off the counters and gave everything a thorough going-over as well. I stopped myself before I de-scaled the coffee maker or pulled the refrigerator out from the wall, though – I have my limits.
Putter-y cleaning in the kitchen is one of those why-don’t-I-do-this-more-often activities. It is so satisfying both in the doing and the aftermath, there is much return for little effort, and Windex smells really lovely.
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